‘The budget doesn’t f*cking matter’: Gary Stevenson on why Hunt’s fiscal plans are ‘deckchairs on the Titanic’
Gary Stevenson, a former trader based in Canary Wharf, quit the City a decade ago to campaign against inequality. Charlie Conchie, sits down with him to ask why.
Gary Stevenson walks through the subterranean shopping tunnels of Canary Wharf in a baggy sweatshirt and tracksuit bottoms looking, by his own admission, like something of a fish out of water.
But about fifteen years ago, this was well and truly his domain. Stevenson first flitted between the restaurants of London’s banking district gathering painful lunch orders as an intern before soaring up the ranks to become Citibank’s most profitable trader in the world. Then, at age 27, he packed it all in.
Looking back over a decade after leaving the Wharf, he says it’s left its mark.
“It’s a bit weird coming back. You just realise how well you know the place,” he tells CityAM in an interview near his former office. “Like, you just walk around and you know where everything is. I know where the bathrooms are.”
Stevenson never did look the part in this world. And that’s sort of his point.
Despite his prodigious mathematical talents he was nearly shut out of the industry due to his background and appearance. While studying at the London School of Economics, his classmates wrote him off on account of a loud Ecko tracksuit and an Ilford twang that bombarded professors from the front row of packed lecture halls.
After acing his first year exams, one of his contemporaries told him of the classroom’s collective surprise: “No one expects that from you.”
“A lot of rich people expect poor people to be stupid,” he comments in his new book, ‘The Trading Game: A Confession’.
Over 400 pages he rails against the duck-to-water way in which oboe-playing classmates slip into the world of high finance. The trading floor, he tells CityAM, is almost an extension of boarding school – a place where monied people from monied families are put in a position “where they need a job like this to remain in the social group”.
The paradox of Stevenson’s rise in Canary Wharf is that he hails from a place closer to this than most.
From the end of his childhood street in Ilford he could see the skyscrapers of London’s banking district in the distance – “the towering temples of capitalism” as he calls them – and as teenagers he and his friends would drive to Canary Wharf to “just hang out”.
People at his former employer Citibank used to ask him where his accent was from. “Down the road”, was the response.
“Growing up in East London, when this came up, and it was new, it felt like that could be ours,” he says. “If somebody builds a skyscraper that I can see from my house, in a sense, it’s partially yours, right? They’re stealing your sky.”
Stevenson’s sense of ownership was largely a testament to his skill and self-belief in the job. Where others might have felt lost in the bravado of his privileged colleagues, his relentless belief in his own talents meant the “class ceiling” never truly troubled him.
“I’m not uncomfortable with my class background. I am who I am, I’m from where I’m from, I talk how I talk. I backed myself to perform on the pitch, basically,” he says.
But even so, the chasm between his impoverished childhood and life as a high-flying City trader, betting on the breakdown of the global economy, began to weigh on his conscience. After a protracted battle with his former employer Citi over deferred bonuses, he quit it all to campaign against the injustice of wealth distribution and warn of impending economic collapse.
Now he spends his time writing and broadcasting from his Youtube channel, Gary’s Economics. Why?
“I need to ring the alarm,” he says. “The way I see it, we’re on the Titanic, I’m the guy that’s seen the iceberg. You know what I mean? I’m trying to let people know.”
Central to his warning is that the mammoth gap between the haves and have nots will stretch society to breaking point. While the trading floors of the City are trapped in a “computer game” in which the only objective is to beat each other, the real economy outside Canary Wharf is creaking.
“The problem you have is a broader intellectual collapse, in that there is a cancerous growth in our economy of inequality. And the vast majority of people don’t know what’s happening.
“If you as an individual have cancer, and you don’t know you have cancer, what is going to happen? The first thing is you need to recognize the source of the problem.”
His book, while called ‘A Confession’, is more a polemic against that disparity. Stevenson himself has come under fire from some quarters for a lack of actual confession. The Guardian in its review said “at some point you expect Stevenson to inject some self-reflection into the narrative”.
A small minority of his followers also seem to ask for more practical solutions from Stevenson in his campaigning. In a Youtube video titled ‘How we fix wealth inequality”, he lays out a vision for stronger wealth taxes and greater awareness.
“We need to create a country where it becomes common knowledge, common sense, that if you don’t fix wealth inequality then you don’t fix the [economic] problem,” he tells his followers in the video.
Amid the deluge of support (“Gary, you are a prophet of our time,” wrote one fan on YouTube), some point to the fact that he is light on actual solutions, outside of higher taxes on the wealthy.
“Would love to know some of your thoughts on how to fix it technically,” reads one comment. “Solutions require coherent and pragmatic policies,” another.
Stevenson’s call to action appears to be one about message spreading and awareness rather than technical solutions. Asked what the grand plan is over the next decade, Stevenson suggests it’s one of profile rather than policy.
“Hopefully the book will be very successful and it will bring a lot of growth to my social media channels,” he says.
“I would like to be the person that your average man or woman on the street goes to when they’re worried about the economy and want to know how to fix it.
“I want to be able to advise them on how to vote and how to influence political parties.”
Does that mean he has his own political ambitions?
“I think that my biggest chance is building a support base among the general public, to educate them on how to protect their interests,” he says. “And then, if the time comes when I feel like joining a political party can really help me achieve what I want to do, then I’m open to doing it. But I think I’d be an idiot right now.”
Policy and organised politics are something, for the minute, he does not have much time for. We speak just before Jeremy Hunt’s budget which he does not predict will be much of an event.
“Traders don’t watch the budget. Why? Because the budget doesn’t fucking matter,” he says. “The truth is the budget is not for me, the trader, the budget is for you, the journalist, and for the people. The budget is to surround the people with trees of detail, so that they cannot see the forest.”
Over text after Hunt has laid out his plans, he gives his verdict: “It’s an economic non-event. A dying Chancellor bribing the public with their own money.”
In his view, budgets and policy are papering over the cracks: “deck chairs on the Titanic stuff” which “surrounds people with a nonsense of meaningless data”.
“The distribution is collapsing. Living standards are collapsing. And it’s not because of these little fucking tinkerman details.”
His mission for the moment is now getting people to come round to his cause. He has committed himself to a life of campaigning to get people to open their eyes and realise the inequality in front of them.
He says he has no regrets over his former life. Now, he’s got his eyes fixed firmly on the future and reshaping the way in which society views inequality and the economy. But first, he’s off for a salt beef beigel at his old favourite lunch spot.